Keywords

Non-azeotropic mixture, Vapour injected system, System configuration

Abstract

Refrigerant mixtures are commonly regarded as a potential substitute because rare pure refrigerants can totally meet all the requirements of environmental, thermodynamic and safe properties. Meanwhile as an effective means, vapour injection is widely applied to improve the system performance of heat pump under large pressure ratio. However, the difference of using pure refrigerant and refrigerant mixtures, which configuration of vapour injection is more suitable for refrigerant mixtures are still unclear. In this paper, R32/R1234ze(E) mixtures are chosen as refrigerant pairs for its great potential in the future, and the scroll compressor is chosen as well to carry out the research for its wide application in vapour injected system. The thermodynamic model with different suction and injected concentration is derived, on the basis of this model, a detailed compressor and system performance comparison of different vapour injected configurations with R32/R1234ze(E) mixtures are investigated. The results indicate that the lower concentration of R32 in flash tank (FT) system will result in higher power consumption compared with intermediate heat exchanger (IHX) system. For the system performance, the heating capacity of FT system is 5%~9.1% higher than IHX system, while the COP of latter system is usually higher, the largest improvement is 2.7% when charged with R32/R1234ze(E) (40/60) mixtures.